SEO Tips That Produce High Rankings In The Search Engines

The goal here is to drive as much traffic to your site as possible and than to monetize that traffic. Just like in real estate where the location is most critical, in online marketing it’s all about traffic and the more you have, the more internet real estate you control. It not hard to imagine that websites ranked on the first page of the search engines have a much higher probability of being visited than those who are not Typically, if you are not on the first page of the search engine results, the chances of getting traffic are slim to non.

Utilizing the right SEO marketing will drive massive traffic to your website. So what are these SEO marketing strategies and how do you find them. The most important factor in determining where you are going to land on the search engine is the content of your keywords. You can use a keyword tool called Wordtracker to identify thousands of high ranking keywords with little or no competition. Wordtracker gives you statistics like keyword effectiveness, word counts in Google, and even how many times the keyword is listed in the title tags. Another SEO Marketing strategy is to use a social bookmarking site, like dig.com. Which allow users to bookmark your content just like you would bookmark one of your favorite websites on your own computer. This dramatically increases your page rank because it tells the search engine that its quality content.

There are many SEO marketing strategies and tactic you can use to drive quality targeted traffic to your website or business. The bottom line is to use quality keywords that are a low incompletion, are being searched for on a daily basis, and have as many links going back to your website as possible. Following these tips and strategies will get you to the top of search engines fast.

How SEO Started
The Internet and its constantly growing reach and scope was the beginning of SEO. After that, search engines would be the second turning point in the history of the Internet, presenting the opportunity to put businesses at the fingertips of prospective clients. Next, SEO would follow after problems arose as to how to best organize websites on search engines.

During the mid – the 1990s, content providers, and Webmasters started utilizing websites for search engines as they were indexing the web pages located all over the Internet. In the beginning, the only thing needed to be submitted was the URL. Following that, the search engines would have web crawlers, also known as spiders, to find and return any information about that web page. The web crawler would also extract links to additional pages and than index those pages on its own server. So when a person was looking for something specific, he/she could type in a word or a group of words and a listing of websites would appear. Sometimes the search query was an exact match, and sometimes it wasn’t exactly a match.

The Internet in its infancy was ripe with ranking manipulation and other abuses by a number of webmasters. It did not take long for some of them to understand the value of keywords, and using SEO to their advantage. Before the coming of algorithms or any SEO Agency, webmasters would stuff web pages with meta tags containing data that was sometimes found to be unreliable. Web pages being ranked on search engines depended on the way webmasters would place keywords. The knowledge of keyword density was also important because traffic equals money. Webmasters also knew how to manipulate HTML attributes on web pages so that these pages would rank higher. Things were looking up for dishonest webmasters, but it did not take long search engines to combat ranking manipulation.

In order to counteract lots of inaccurate representation among some web site’s web pages, better SEO was implemented. Now websites were ranked according to relevance. The need for someone who could properly manipulate these new standards in determining page rank allowed SEO agencies to take center stage.
SEO first became recognized when websites owners realized the importance of having their websites ranked and seen among the very first search engine results. The first documented usage of the term “search engine optimization” was by John Audete, founder of Multimedia Marketing Group in 1995. SEO is the best of all Web design and online marketing strategies. Make use of it and you will definitely like the results. I wish you all the best.

Allow me to introduce myself.  My name is Jonathan Carter.  I’ve been a web developer since 2007.  I currently work for a county government agency in the Myrtle Beach, SC area.  Yes, living at the beach is a delight, but I have to say I’m guilty for forgetting it’s there sometimes.  I graduated Coastal Carolina University in 2006 with a bachelors in graphic design.  Shortly after graduating, I started working at a marketing agency here in Myrtle Beach and started diving into HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.  That got old real quick and I started learning my first server-side language, ColdFusioon (I think it was ColdFusion MX at the time).  A couple of years in the marketing agency left me thirsty for web development, so I got a job with the county government as an ASP.NET web application developer.  I mainly work with VB.NET, C#, ADO.NET, SQL Server, and DotNetNuke.  Don’t worry, I’ll be covering other categories.  I don’t particularly care for the Microsoft .NET framework, and think it’s a little bloated in my opinion.

I come across little snippets of code, or simple methods daily and thought it would be a great way to give back if I started a blog of my own.  Thanks for visiting – first blog post… complete!

So here’s what I’m thinking:

I’ll create a site as I normally would with a main stylesheet.  This stylesheet will be where most of my rules are defined for the layout minus the main width of the site.  Keep this in mind when you’re writing your CSS so it will be a simple modification to change the width of the site.  I’m also going to include a copy of jQuery right above the stylesheet.

Then, I’ll create another stylesheet and give it an ID of “smartCSS” so I can reference it via JavaScript (jQuery).  This stylesheet will basically be used set the width of the site to the industry standard.  It should also be placed directly below the existing “main.css” file like so…

normal.css:

Now, I’m going to prepare a 3rd stylesheet called “wide.css”. This will be replacing “normal.css” with jQuery when the browser window is wider than 800 pixels.

wide.css:

Here’s where the power comes in… jQuery. This code can be placed anywhere in the document. Some popular places are within the <head> (if you’re going to place it here, it should be directly before the closing head tag. You’re stylesheets and jQuery source file should be above this). You could also put it directly before the closing body tag.

Allow me to explain:

Line 2 creates a function that gets the width of the browser window. It then checks if the window is greater than 800 pixels. If it is, it sets the “href” attribute of the smartCSS stylesheet to “css/wide.css”. Otherwise, it sets it to “css/normal.css”. This is just defining a function. It never runs unless it’s called. On line 10, it does just that. When the page is loaded, it fires off the function once. This will make the website determine your browser’s width and set it accordingly when the page is loaded. The neat part is on line 11. The jQuery resize() function is called hundreds of times while the browser window is being resized by the user. Every time this occurs, the site is making a choice on how to display the content.

I prepared a demo for you so you can see it in action:

View the Demo

Today, enough was enough.  I looked at the source code from the browser and thought that since the stylesheet had a unique ID, I could just remove it with the jQuery “.remove()” function.  You can add this small script anywhere on your page, it just has to be placed after the corresponding stylesheet you want to remove.

Here’s the link tag I want to remove:

…and here’s how I removed it with jQuery:

Anyway, here’s what I’ll be creating today… (go ahead and mouse over Jack).

No need for an independent sample page.  This script is pretty easy.  It’s really just a few lines of JavaScript/jQuery.

The HTML…

The CSS…

The JavaScript/jQuery…

English Translation:

Starting with the HTML, I use a DIV with a class of “theBox” as my main container. I used a class and not an ID intentionally, so it gives me the option to add another image with a caption on the same page (thinking ahead is always good programming practice). The CSS is pretty standard. The important part is to have a position of relative and overflow:hidden on “theBox”. Then, when you set a position:relative for “theBoxCaption”, you need to set the “top” property to match the height of “theBox”. The rest is really powered by jQuery. I’ve seen a lot of plugins out there and always wanted to come up with a way to do this on my own.

The only property I’m animating here is the “top” property on “theBoxCaption”. Initially, this gets set by the CSS of the page (it’s set to 200px). Then, I do some calculating to find out what the top value needs to be at the end of the animation. I subtract the height of the “captionBox” from the height of “theBox”. Then, it’s just a matter of sending that value in an animate function. The second argument of my .hover() function is actually the mouseOut event. A lot of people don’t realize that you don’t need a separate MouseOut event and that you simply just write that in the 2nd argument for the .hover() function. For this example, I’m just reversing what I did and animating the “top” value of “theCaptionBox” back to the height of the main parent container (“theBox”).

This has sort of encouraged me to write my own plugin – maybe I’ll repost this topic at that time. I hope you find this useful.

I continued to sign up for an Apple account on her phone. After filling in the long form, I finally got a message telling me to verify the account through the email that was sent to her. I signed in to her email… nothing. I tried multiple times to resend the email from her phone… still nothing hours later. I even tried signing her into iTunes thinking I’d be able to manage her account in there, but iTunes wouldn’t even let me sign in without verifying the account.

I finally went searching online a way to manage my apple account without it being verified and I found a little hidden nugget. Go to https://appleid.apple.com and click on “Manage your account”. From there you can sign in and have the system resend the verification email. This was the only time the email functionality worked. It finally came through and I was able to click on the encrypted link to verify my account.

I hope this helps someone out there. I was about ready to pull my hair out on this. No wonder why technology annoys so many people. Apple, if you’re reading this, you may need to investigate your email function coding. I read a ton of forums of people barking about this same issue with no resolutions.

In a few lines of code I was able to add an image next to the column header like the example above (see that little triangle?).  I was amazed on what I found online when researching this.  Many developers have a tendency of over-complicating things, so my code below is as bare-bones as possible.

VB.NET (Code-Behind on GridView RowCreated Event):

Line-By-Line:

It’s assumed you already have a GridView databound to an object datasource and you have sorting enabled. This code-behind should be under the gridview (gv1) RowCreated event.

• 1 – Checks if the row being generated is a header row (otherwise, the row is ignored)
• 2 – Sets up a loop to go through each cell, or field, in the row
• 3 – Checks if the sort expression of the GridView matches the current field/column
• If the sort expression matched – enter lines 4 – 11
• 4 – Creates a new image object called ‘sortImage’
• 5 – 9 – Tests the GridView’s current sort direction.  If it’s ‘Ascending’, assign an ImageUrl (you need ascending/descending icons – mine are in my ‘/images’ folder).  Otherwise, assign the descending image to the ImageUrl
• 10 – Sets ALT text to the image so we keep W3C compliance – Mine is a concatenated string that would be something like ‘Sorted Descending’
• 11 – Adds the image to the header cell

I hope this helps someone out there.  I know there are many ways to do this, but this seemed to be the most light-weight scenario I could come up with without using a third-party solution.

So my main concept here is to have a sidebar that would stick to the top of the page once the window was about to pass it by while scrolling. This could be used for dozens of reasons. Perhaps you want to ensure your advertisements are being shown the maximum amount of time possible; or maybe you want to offer your visitors an area of quick-links so they wouldn’t have to scroll to the top of the page to navigate somewhere else.  The site I’m working on is e commerce, so it will be an area to up-sell other products relative to the page the user is viewing.

In the code below, I have two DIVs floating that represent the main content area and the sidebar.  Sidebars are usually shorter than the main content area, so this is where my sticky DIV will be.  I give it an id of “sticker” (original, huh?).  With some jQuery, I’m able to fire off a function every time I scroll on the page.  This function calculates my current position, or viewport, or distance from the top.  It also calculates how far from the top my “sticker” div is.  Then, there’s an IF statement that’s fired off…

IF my current position is greater or equal to the “sticker” position, give the sticker div a class of “stick”.  This changes the CSS of the div to have a FIXED position as long as the viewport is lower than the position of the sticker.

HTML – Nothing crazy going on here – a mere 2-column setup

CSS –  Again, nothing super high-tech – just not the styles applied to div#sticker and the class “.stick”

jQuery – Calculates the position of the sticker div and makes its position fixed if the page has scrolled that far

Conclusion – I used to think these sticker DIVs were annoying, but I’m coming across more and more ideas to implement them to help the visitor. I have also thrown a demo page together if you want to see it in action. Download zipped source code

* UPDATE – per David’s request, the sticker stops at the large footer – demo page 2 – Download zipped source code (2.0)

Make sure you’re running PHP 5.3 – as soon as I made this change, all 3 sites (including this one) started behaving normally again. You can make this change by adding the following code to you .htaccess file for each of your wordpress applications:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php53 .php

Sidenote: I use bluehost as my hosting provider and the default configuration is PHP 5.2 with a single php.ini file. I did not change this setting in the PHP Config section of cPanel. I simply updated each .htaccess file in the root of each website. I hope someone finds this useful out there.